Chapter 14

He’d been back for a week when shopping day arrived. The Safeway on Clement Street was Maria’s preferred grocery. She shopped on Saturday mornings because, she had explained to Quinn on the drive over, the store’s delivery came Friday afternoon, and if you were there before ten on Saturday, you got the pick of the produce. Getting the best produce was, in Maria’s operational philosophy, a necessity.

Quinn’s job was pushing the cart. This had become his function on the Saturday grocery runs. He cheerfully pushed the cart, reached for high things, and carried things.

It was a good Saturday morning. The produce was good. Maria was in the middle of a story about a disagreement between Mrs. O’Toole and the dry cleaner on Sacramento Street that had apparently escalated over three visits into a major incident. Quinn was listening with genuine interest because the fact that stern Ms. O’Toole was in a fight was a surprising and interesting anomaly.

They came out the main entrance at nine forty-seven with two full carts and the comfortable rhythm of a routine they’d done enough times to have it organized between them.

Quinn spotted the men standing a car away from Maria’s car. He noted them the way he habitually monitored the environment—not with alarm, just noting a possible threat.

Two long-haired, unkempt men in their mid-twenties were obviously tweaking. The was a air of jerky, abruptness of motion that he’d learned to identify long ago. He was certain of it before they’d covered half the distance.

He registered with the cold, practical part of his mind that Maria’s car was between them and the tweakers.

“Maria,” he said quietly. “Stay behind me.”

She looked at him and then looked at the men and he saw her understand.

Their timing was off from the start, which would have been funny except that it wasn’t. The taller one went for the driver’s side door at the same moment Maria reached for her key fob to unlock it. The sequence of what was planned clearly existed in his head as a clean, fast operation, but his body was overloaded with chemicals that made the clean and quick impossible. He said something that was meant to be threatening but was instead garbled nonsense. The shorter one came around the cart, reaching, and knocked into it instead of past it. He staggered as he closed in on Quinn.

Quinn watched this with the cold, assessing alertness that he always had when faced with a threat. He was calculating distance, angle, the impairment level, and what that meant about speed and reaction time.

Then the taller one, getting increasingly frustrated, turned and slapped Maria, knocking her down. Her knee hit the ground, and her purse flew scattering its contents as she made a sharp cry of pain.

Quinn moved.

Later, he would identify the feeling by its temperature. Not hot. People said rage was hot; in his experience it wasn’t. He just felt utter cold rage.

The taller one was turning back toward the car after slapping Maria. Quinn came at him from the side and slightly behind with the angle Yakov had drilled into him. The elbow strike to the jaw was precise and vicious, delivered with everything his body had. He felt it the way Yaakov had told him he would feel a correctly delivered strike—a meaty jolt and the guy’s jaw broke

He staggered, and Quinn delivered work hardened fist strike that broke the man’s collarbone.

The shorter guy was dumbly processing what had just happened to his partner. Quinn didn’t wait. He moved inside his arm — always inside, never outside; outside gives them the leverage, inside takes it — and his forearm strike connected with the side of the man’s head. He instantly dropped bonelessly down on the Safeway parking lot.